Recruitment During Table-Cooked Meals: Foregrounding and Backgrounding Offers and Acts of Assistance Within Multi-Party Talk

This chapter introduces multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA) as a research framework for CLIL classroom interaction. We begin by presenting key methodological principles of CA and discussing how CA has recently broadened its analytical focus to examine how modalities such as gestures and texts are used as resources for interaction. Following this, we review recent (multimodal) CA work that has investigated teaching and learning practices in classrooms involving second language users, such as in CLIL and immersion settings. To illustrate the described methodological orientation, we briefly analyse one video-recorded interaction and conclude by suggesting research areas related to CLIL classrooms that could benefit from a multimodal CA perspective.

This article demonstrates a methodology for studying the translation process from the perspective of multimodal social interaction and applies this methodology to a case analysis of collaborative audio description. The methodology is multimodal conversation analysis, which aims to uncover the way in which multimodal communication resources (e.g., talk, gaze, gestures) are used holistically and situatedly in building human action. Being empirical and data-driven, multimodal conversation analysis observes human conduct in its natural setting. This article analyses video data from an authentic audio-description process and presents the multimodal constitution of problem-solving sequences during translating. In addition, the article discusses issues regarding the methodological choices facing researchers who are interested in human interaction in translation. The article shows that applying multimodal conversation analysis opens new avenues for research into the translation process and collaborative translation.

This chapter provides a background of classroom discourse research with particular focus on research into the interactional organization of classroom interaction. Walsh’s (200, 2011) modes are introduced as a key framework for this volume. Prior research on student participation is summarized here, including the concepts of (un)willingness to participate and classroom interactional competence. Finally, multimodal conversation analysis, the methodological framework for this volume, is presented, including brief summaries of research on gaze, gesture, body movement, artifacts, and complex multimodal Gestalts. Notes on transcription practices are presented here, as well as descriptions of the data corpora drawn upon for this study.

Telecollaboration in pre‐service teacher education promotes intercultural communicative competence and bridges knowledge and practice. Although a growing body of studies has addressed the affordances of telecollaboration for developing student‐teachers' (STs') competencies, research focusing on their knowledge of classroom interaction—and on multimodal aspects of classroom interaction in particular—is scarce. Using multimodal conversation analysis (MCA), we address this research gap by investigating the affordances of telecollaboration between STs in Sweden and Japan to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction. The study comes from a “parallel‐course project” that aimed to design and conduct telecollaborative tasks within the context of two pre‐service English language teacher education courses in Sweden and Japan. The participants ( N = 12) met online and worked on video‐based tasks using authentic classroom videos. They were grouped to conduct four online sessions (202 min of screen recordings) for analyzing classroom videos and transcriptions. Using MCA, a collection of 51 cases where STs notice and discuss multimodal aspects of teaching was compiled. The findings show that this telecollaboration allowed the STs to notice multimodal aspects of language classroom interaction, including teachers' gestures, gaze, and facial expressions in Japanese and European contexts. We demonstrate that the tasks facilitate collaborative noticing, enactment, and functional description of pedagogical gestures. The tasks also allowed the STs to discuss similarities and differences between the pedagogical cultures, contributing to their awareness of classroom interactional competence. Our study addresses a methodological gap in telecollaboration research by employing MCA. Implications for telecollaboration and curricula in language teacher education, as well as for using conversation analysis as a research methodology, will be given.

Virtual exchange refers to technology-enabled online communication between people who are geographically separated from each other. It has been increasingly adopted in education in the past two decades, especially since early 2020 when teachers and students were forced to move to an online mode of teaching and international exchange owing to the most recent pandemic. The current study is based on a nine-week virtual exchange project that took place between 22 students learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) from a British university and their partners from a Chinese university. The subjects conversed online with each other on self-directed topics on a weekly basis, and they completed their collaboration project for showcasing in the final week. From a translanguaging perspective, naturally occurring online conversations between intercultural interlocutors were investigated through the method of multimodal conversation analysis (MCA). The students leveraged a range of linguistic, semiotic and multimodal resources to navigate through communication with their partners. It is hoped that this study will contribute to the understanding of how translanguaging is embodied in virtual exchange interaction and how MCA can be applied to reveal the details present at the micro level of intercultural exchanges in the CFL context.

There is a growing interest in the field of translanguaging in EMI classrooms and the majority of the studies tend to employ functional discourse analysis and ethnographic observations to understand the nature of translanguaging practices in EMI classrooms. However, there is a lack of studies which explicate the detailed processes of how translanguaging practices are realised in EMI classrooms for promoting content and language learning. This chapter explores the possibility of combining Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) and an ethnographic approach in order to better understand how translanguaging practices are realised in EMI classrooms and how translanguaging can facilitate content and language learning in an EMI context. Preliminary analysis from my feasibility trial, which is carried out in Hong Kong EMI secondary mathematics lessons, will be employed to illustrate the arguments. This chapter will argue that MCA can be used to discover the complex multilingual and multimodal resources employed by the interactants in co-constructing meanings through translanguaging in EMI classroom interactions. Moreover, using an ethnographic approach to complement the MCA analysis can potentially allow translanguaging researchers to understand how the wider sociocultural contexts and the identities of the participants play a role in affecting the participants’ own translanguaging practices.

Leader identity has traditionally been associated with hierarchical position (formal leadership). Yet, while there is an increasing tendency to regard leadership as a collective and distributed process, very little is known about the interplay of formal and informal leadership as in situ social practice within a hierarchical context. Using video-recordings of naturally occurring workplace interaction as data and arguing that insights from applied linguistics can be profitably employed to address such a lacuna, we use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to show how ‘doing’ leadership is not limited to the formal leader. Rather, through talk, gaze, the use of space, artefacts and so on, it is negotiated in subtle ways which allow informal leadership to emerge in conjunction, and in this case in conflict, with formal leadership. We conclude this article by discussing the wider implications of these findings to both leadership theory and methodologies used to investigate the ‘just whatness’ of leadership.

This study investigates word finding difficulties in military meetings during a crisis management exercise in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). Multimodal conversation analysis (CA) is used to examine how searching for a next item in a turn-in-progress, i.e., a word search, is attended to via coordination of verbal and embodied conduct. The analysis shows different kinds of word search organizations: searches can be initiated and carried out without recruiting the co-participants’ assistance, co-participation can be invited to varying degrees, and searches can be collaboratively completed without the speaker's visible attempts to solicit assistance. These organizations are illustrative of the institutional and interactional context, namely that the opportunities to invite and manage co-participation via verbal and bodily-visual resources, such as gaze and indexing or iconic gestures, are in some cases more limited than in others. These opportunities are foremost connected to the sequential and sociomaterial environment of word searches and the situated roles enacted by the participants. The study highlights word searches as discrete activities that make linguistic and epistemic discrepancies between the speaker and co-participants relevant and negotiable in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction.

Conversation analytical research on second language use and learning (CA-SLA) understands second language learning as a socially displayed process, made visible through a variety of linguistic and embodied actions. Detailed analysis of these actions requires good-quality video data from interactions relevant in learners’ life-worlds. The sound and visual quality of videos as well as the positioning of the camera with regard to the participants in the interactions delimit what the analyst can observe and analyze and are therefore important factors in constructing the reliability of research (Mondada, 2013; Peräkylä, 2004). Moreover, choices made in transcribing and presenting data extracts are crucial in terms of research validity for CA and consequential for the analysis. This chapter introduces some basic principles of multimodal conversation analysis (CA) as a research method when applied to analyzing second language use and learning from the multimodal perspective. It discusses how to collect, transcribe, and analyze multimodal data from everyday interactions.

This study investigates the occurrence of students’ language alternation practices during second language (L2) book talk. The data were collected at a voluntary book club for learning English at a university in Korea. The book club was implemented using Zoom. In this context, using multimodal conversation analysis, I highlight instances in which students successfully construct their book talk in English (their L2) but go further by providing translations in Korean (their first language), thus doing repair to deal with (potential) problems of understanding and speaking. The findings show that through these self-repair practices of translation the student-speakers are not only (1) pursuing mutual understanding with the recipients but also (2) managing their turn construction in their doing of book talk. I argue that through these language alternation practices, the students are treating the establishment of intersubjectivity as a central activity of the book talk, which reflects their anticipation of recipients’ possible difficulties in understanding the L2. The findings contribute to a better understanding of language alternation practices in a language learning context and expand our understanding of the endogenous nature of L2 book club activities conducted in a synchronous online session.

This article examines conversation analysis (CA) as a methodology for usability research for technologies used in multiparty contexts. Current laboratory-based usability practices often cannot account for how technologies are used in multi-participant interactions outside of the laboratory. In this article, I review new materialist approaches to usability and consider how CA might be integrated into this theoretical perspective. To do so, I present an example transcript of CA and review CA research on telemedicine in multiparty environments. I use this approach to argue that incorporating CA into a new materialist approach can help usability researchers to reconfigure the technical design of and the socio-material practices surrounding technologies.

Virtual exchange (VE) projects in pre-service language teacher education are increasingly being recognized as an innovative practice due to their affordances for providing teacher learning opportunities in technology-rich environments. This study aims to report these opportunities based on results from a VE project consisting of diverse teacher education activities, including lectures, webinars, asynchronous tasks, and synchronous video-mediated interactions. This project provides a medium for pre-service teachers to collaboratively design a lesson to be implemented in hybrid language learning environments. We specifically deal with the video-mediated interactions of the transnational groups of pre-service language teachers using multimodal conversation analysis (CA) as the research methodology and investigate VE phases to explore how their interactions become consequential for the final pedagogical design. The findings show that the pre-service teachers retrospectively orient to shared practices in the earlier phases of the VE project, and the deployment of retrospective orientation as an interactional resource creates interactional space for collaborative decision-making related to their pedagogical designs. We argue that tracking the video-mediated pedagogical interactions of the pre-service teachers using CA is a methodological innovation that allows researchers to collect interactional evidence for the emergent teacher learning opportunities. The findings bring new insights to the role of the technology-mediated settings (e.g. VEs and telecollaboration) in language learning, teaching, and teacher education and in bridging different cultures, curricula, and physical spaces.

This study examines participation in language play (LP) during spontaneous multiparty talk in a Foreign Language Housing (FLH) program. FLH programs represent hybrid spaces where talk emerges naturally for social reasons but is framed under an institutional purpose for language learning. Given its multifunctional ability to simultaneously coordinate both sociable humor and learning-in-interaction, LP emerges as a salient resource in such dual-purpose environments. Using a multimodal Conversation Analysis of two extended sequences of LP during mealtime conversations, this study analyzes how FLH participants deploy verbal and embodied resources to organize participation in LP. It then illustrates how these strategies dynamically orient to sociability and learning, thereby constructing a hybrid social-and-learning interactional space. As prior studies of LP and learning draw primarily from classroom dyadic conversations, this study sheds additional light on the role of LP in regulating multiparty social talk, with application to understanding the interactional organization of informal immersion-based language learning programs.

This study offers a novel perspective on interpreter visibility by exploring speaker references to interpreters, which differs from previous research that primarily focused on interpreter visibility through their own discourse contributions. Employing a multimodal conversation analysis approach, the study examined the verbal and nonverbal resources utilized by speakers and interpreters in 98 selected excerpts taken from press conference interpreting sessions at the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). The analysis revealed six distinct topics that denoted the ways in which interpreters were rendered noticeable to the audience through the speaker’s references. These references were context dependent, leading to subsequent speaker–interpreter interactions where interpreters became highly visible. In addition to verbal cues, nonverbal semiotics played a crucial role in demonstrating how interpreters working in rigidly structured press conferences could function as active co-participants of discourse, and how the speaker and interpreter could collaborate to facilitate the interpreter’s visibility and promote a relaxed communicative environment. These findings shed new light on the interpreter’s role, underscoring that it is a dynamic phenomenon requiring analysis in relation to the specific communicative context. This study demonstrated the efficacy of utilizing multimodal conversation analysis as a methodology to explore interactions between speakers and interpreters and to gain a deeper understanding of the complex and nuanced aspects of conference interpreting.

Recent research has examined how teachers utilize translanguaging to tap into students’ out-of-school knowledge and students’ prior learnt content knowledge to scaffold students’ learning of new content knowledge. This study addresses a research gap by examining how teachers can maximize the utilization of mutually shared knowledge, which is not accessible to individuals outside the classroom community, through translanguaging to consolidate students’ content learning. The data is derived from a larger project conducted in Hong Kong secondary English-Medium-Instruction mathematics classrooms. Multimodal Conversation Analysis (MCA) is employed to analyse classroom interactions, triangulated by video-stimulated-recall interviews analysed with Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). I argue that establishing a translanguaging space allows teachers to capitalize on the shared sociocultural knowledge intrinsic to classroom communities, which shapes content instruction and forges meaningful relationships with students. I also highlight the significance of combining MCA with IPA to gain a deeper understanding of specific translanguaging moments and the reasoning behind incorporating mutually shared sociocultural knowledge into classroom interactions, which cannot be attained solely through the description of interactional sequences.